Swann's Way

point he had (whimsically entreated by Odette) abandoned the idea of
getting some 'professional' to play over to him the whole sonata, of
which he still knew no more than this one passage. "Why do you want the
rest?" she had asked him. "Our little bit; that's all we need." He went
farther; agonised by the reflection, at the moment when it passed by
him, so near and yet so infinitely remote, that, while it was addressed
to their ears, it knew them not, he would regret, almost, that it had
a meaning of its own, an intrinsic and unalterable beauty, foreign to
themselves, just as in the jewels given to us, or even in the letters
written to us by a woman with whom we are in love, we find fault with
the 'water' of a stone, or with the words of a sentence because they are
not fashioned exclusively from the spirit of a fleeting intimacy and of
a 'lass unparalleled.'

It would happen, as often as not, that he had stayed so long outside,
with his little girl, before going to the Verdurins' that, as soon as
the little phrase had been rendered by the pianist, Swann would discover
that it was almost time for Odette to go home. He used to take her back
as far as the door of her little house in the Rue La Pérouse, behind the